38: One Brand or Multiple brands

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of DSO Secrets. I'm your fearless host, Emmett Scott, and I'm always thrilled to be with you. I'll tell you, today's a big day for me and my team. Just a little personal note. We moved into 25,000 square feet today, and considering the fact that I started with my support center working out of my car, you can imagine how excited we are to have reached this point where we're supporting enough team members to need this space to help support our doctors and our patient flow and our staff, call center and billing team and to be at this place. This is an exciting day for me. But just recently I presented at Adso, and the question was around the the many paths to building a dso. And I got a list of questions from each of you on Facebook and other resources, emails, texts, et cetera, that I compiled for this presentation. And I thought, who wants to read a presentation? I'll podcast these out. So I'm just going to do one or two at a time. We're going to start with question number one. Which is one brand or multiple brands? See, everybody wants to know, do. As I open up each of my practices, should I keep them under a single brand or should I do multiple brands? Here's how I divide that thinking, because we've done both. I've seen both in the marketplace, and I see the principles for each of them that I want to share with you. Here's the benefits of a single brand. Obviously, you're building brand recognition. Now, what's important, as we talked about in the last episode, is people want consistency. So if you're going to have a single brand, make sure that when people walk into it, whatever brand one is, that when they walk into brand one, some other location, that it looks and feels very, very similar. If you've got all different themes, different colors, different culture pieces that are feeding into those offices, there is no reason to do one Brand. In fact, I'd argue there's a lot of reasons to do multip brands. So brand recognition comes with the emotional feeling people have in that connection to that brand, that consistency with that brand. So the benefit of a single brand is people know how it feels when they walk in and when they see that brand somewhere else, they say, ooh, I want to go there. I know how that feels. I know how they work. I like the consistency. I like the culture of that process. That's why you do a single brand along with that. Number two is you want to own a niche. That brand has a purpose, it has a patient type, a customer that it's targeting towards. So you're building up that brand with that customer type. If that's not in your strategy, then what's the single brand for? It's not really consistently going after the same customer. So if you're thinking single brand, also make sure you've targeted what your single niche is. Who's the customer that you're going after. Now, obviously, single brand also has a lot of big vision associated with it. No one ever says, I'm going single brand. That is single location, right? You're thinking single brand because you're doing a lot of locations. So your goal has to be that those brands are somewhat interconnected so that you can get some leverage, you know, regionally or nationally for marketing. You want to be able to do a mail blast to a large location, knowing that you have a concentration of locations there. So that would be another reason to have a single brand, as you believe that your brand recognition, you're going to leverage that either with radio, social media, mail outs, whatever medium you're going to use for marketing. And you believe that customers are going to be able to see it in multiple places by doing that radio ad or that flyer blast or whatever it might be. Another reason to do single brand is just efficiency. No marketing department loves to manage multiple brands. They love to be able to have a single brand that they're managing, that they can create a flyer, know that they just have to change the address or that they can put multiple addresses on when they create materials for the practices, when they create audio ads for radio or commercials for tv. Obviously they can spend more money on a single ad type than having to break it out on a lot of different design types. So single brand has kind of these utopic efficiency that marketing departments love when they have to build that website, right? Having to build all different brands, obviously you don't get the same leverage off of that. Now Any one of these could be a reason to try to keep things as a single brand. Brand recognition, owning your niche, trying to get regional or national marketing leverage, and obviously more efficiency with your marketing assets and your marketing management. So why in the world would anyone go multiple brands? Well, there's several reasons there as well. One is it might have a local feel to it. Maybe you don't want to feel like you have multiple locations for them to go to. You want them to feel like it's a neighborhood place. Maybe that's the niche that you're going after. That's a customer type. Maybe that's the doctors you're recruiting. You want to want them to feel like they're part of a local feel. You want them to own that practice a little bit more by having a brand that's specific to that neighborhood, to that community. Now, many of you are doing acquisitions. You're not doing de novo new locations. So multiple brands can really make sense. It's hard to have a single brand that has consistency when the reality is you didn't design the facility and you don't plan on putting money into that facility to create the same design. Maybe it already has momentum in the community. So the last thing you want to do is create a financial J curve by changing up all the brand, creating some confusion in the marketplace. Maybe you're thrilled with the momentum that that brand has, and so you stay with it. Maybe there's regulatory components associated with it. Maybe you want to have multiple brands so that if something happens at any one location and media picks that up. Maybe you don't want that blasted across all of your locations and affect them because of one location that maybe got hit by a legal lawsuit or had a patient that was super upset or had an employee that went sideways, et cetera. Now your whole company is at risk because I got picked up by the media and this one satellite location is now affecting all the other locations. So those could be thought processes that, that go into multiple brands. You want to have a local feel. You've got established momentum on an acquisition. You really don't see a way that you can keep your brand consistency based on maybe the culture that you acquired or the facility design, or maybe it's a risk management tool. So there you have it. Those are the pros and cons. One brand or multiple brands, or maybe you're some mixture. You have a, a set of single brands that are going after a niche. You're doing some acquisitions. You have multiple brands there that you're, that you're managing. Whatever your strategy, just make sure you're doing it consciously. Maybe use this checklist with your team and say, who are we? What's smart for the business today? If you have any more questions around one brand or multiple brand, come join us on our Facebook page, DSO Secrets. And until next time, keep smiling.

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